> Politics is downstream from persuasion, and law is downstream from language. Trump has failed to perform the role of a diligent executive, reserving much of his day for television, personal calls, and cultural encyclicals on Twitter.

> "Psychogeography is the study of the effects of geographical settings, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual”.

> Détournment is a dialectical tool. It is an "insurrectional style" by which a past form is used to show its own inherent untruth-- an untruth masked by ideology. It can be applied to billboards, written texts, films, cartoons, blog posts, etc., as well as to city spaces.

>- diverse activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around you
- attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to place and environment
serious fun
- often political and critical of the status quo

With a turn towards the revolutionary. China
> Psychogeography is the effect of place upon the psyche and the importance of the psyche within the landscape. The term was first discussed in the early 1950s by Guy Debord of the Situationist International, who attributed its coining to “an illiterate Kabyle.” The concept itself is simple, ancient, and foundational to an animist view of the world.

Calling it a joke makes Sanders and the other functionaries complicit. Just following orders. But it’s an attempt at making us all complicit. The language of dictators.

> More importantly, though, is the rhetorical usefulness of playing off a smiling accusation -- of treason, a capital offense -- as a gag. To start, it immediately diminishes those who find it upsetting. Implicit in Sanders' defense is a taunt: What's wrong, can't take a joke? It's a conversation ender, and for Trump, one he used successfully on his way to the White House and in his first year in the job.

> For him that is not “populism” (or the U.S. version, “economic anxiety,”) nor garden-variety corruption nor even longer-term democratic distress. Instead it is the reawakening of the force that began destroying Europe a century ago, outright fascism:

The term populism, being the preferred description for a modern-day revolt of the masses, will not provide any meaningful understanding concerning that phenomenon … The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting our societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy.

> The new embassy is bland, vanilla, just as a diplomatic dinner is rarely riotous and a diplomatic speech is rarely spellbinding. Its use of art and nature and decoration are somewhat Starbucks – a grande vanilla latte then – and with approximately the same relation to real architecture as that has to real coffee. Timberlake’s multiple objectives are all good and worthy, but like wishing for world peace and an end to hunger are a touch platitudinous. They also contain the occasional conflict and contradiction – most obviously between being fortified and being nice – which the architects have chosen to smooth over rather than dramatise. The basic shape of the building is a cube, which Timberlake explains as being a timeless form. It does give the embassy a presence, but – because it minimises the amount of expensive external skin in relation to the volume – it also happens to be the most efficient shape for an office building.

> Nine Elms was a shrewd choice. It was one of the only places in London where the US could dictate the evolution of a masterplan that would put its shimmering cube at the centre of a fortified arc of paranoia, its building set back behind a militarised terrain of berms, mounds and moats, and surrounded by a necklace of some of the most expensive new apartments in the city, whose developers have been eager to cash in on being part of a new high-security “diplomatic quarter”.

It's in the language. A discourse community identifies its constituents by their language.

>He shares their worldview as easily as he shares their language and videos. He gives their voice and values the biggest platform in politics. He is a neo-fascist sympathizer in the mainstream of American politics, sitting at the heart of the West Wing and world power.

> This article serves as the introduction to DHQ's Special Issue, "Imagining the DH Undergraduate: Special Issue in Undergraduate Education in DH." Co-editors Emily Christina Murphy and Shannon R. Smith introduce the issue–its signficance, theoretical underpinnings, structure, articles, and case studies. The special issue is organized into four thematic clusters: 1) program models; 2) disciplinarity and DH pedagogy; 3) tool development; and 4) professional concerns.

> Yes, the forms of the Constitution remain largely intact after nine months. But the norms that make the Constitution work are crumbling. The structure looks the same, but Trump has relentlessly attacked their foundations. Do not therefore keep your eyes on the surface. Put your ear to the ground.

> In a country led by a swirling void, all sorts of inhibitions slowly slip away. Nativism, racism, nationalism: these are very potent catalysts of human darkness. Usually it is the president who takes responsibility when these demons appear to emerge, and attempts to refute, or discredit or calm them. But this one amps them up.

> Trump’s retrograde presidency has revealed the profound contradictions at the top of the US income ladder. In the wake of the president’s various actions toward immigrants and inflammatory remarks on race, we’ve gotten glimpses of a wealthy class with a powerful social conscience and the potential to offer leadership on some of the most divisive social issues of the day, as well as other urgent matters like climate change.

> Yet don’t expect an enlightened new establishment to command moral authority any time soon. That can’t happen until the wealthy and business leaders extend their vision of inclusiveness to the most important sphere of American life: the economy.

> With Tuesday’s address, however, Trump punched yawning holes in his own would-be doctrine, singling out enemies, expressing horror at their treatment of their people and threatening interference to the point of annihilation.

Who knew leadership could be so HARD! Cultural tourism can be so tedious. Especially at a distance. Look to the sequence of statements.

> Since the rain began falling, however, Trump has struggled to respond to the first natural disaster of his presidency with anything other than contrived seriousness at best, morbid fascination at worst.

> “Record setting rainfall,” Trump observed, before quickly getting in a plug for a friend’s book. “Many people are now saying that this is the worst storm/hurricane they have ever seen. Good news is that we have great talent on the ground,” he noted. “Wow - Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood! We have an all out effort going, and going well!”

> Notes Very Necessary is a collaboratively authored web-based multi-media essay that aims to addresses climate change by remixing images, text, and data generated by centuries imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, and scientific exploration in the Arctic. The title is borrowed from an essay authored in 1580 by the Englishmen Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman offering detailed instructions on how to conquer new territories by taking copious notes. In 2015 Barbara Bridger and J. R. Carpenter attempted to follow these instructions by making, finding, and faking notes, images, data, and diagrams online and reconfiguring them into a new narrative.

Once more into the rhetorical situation - how Trump deals with the social demand for speech.

> On Tuesday he “relinquished what presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan have regarded as a cardinal duty of their job: set a moral course to unify the nation,” wrote The Times’s Mark Landler, in what was correctly labeled a news analysis and not an opinion column. Landler’s assessment, echoed by countless others, was as unassailable as it was haunting, and it was prompted in part by Trump’s perverse response to a question that it’s hard to imagine another president being asked: Did he place the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., on the same “moral plane” as those who showed up to push back at them?

> A soft coup against a cuckoo: It confirmed how impotent Trump had become.

> “Trump is using the precious capital of the bully pulpit to talk about confederate monuments in between savage attacks on fellow Republicans,” Holmes, the former aide to McConnell, told Politico Playbook. “Just think about that. Not tax reform. Not repeal and replace. Not North Korean nuclear capabilities. No focused critiques on extremely vulnerable Democrats who have opposed him at every possible turn.”

Raging against the light. > he had reduced a moral crossroads for the country to a question of naming rights. Standing in front of reporters, Trump came across as an angry man sheltered by a building bearing his own name in big, gold letters. But for how long? Tenants in some buildings have already asked to have the “Trump” taken off. Where would it stop? Would there, perhaps, never even be a statue of Donald J. Trump?

> I recognise these omens of doom. Chilling signs are everywhere, perhaps the biggest being that the US allows itself to be led by Donald Trump, a man deficient in honour, wisdom and just simple human kindness. It is as foolish for Americans to believe that their generals will save them from Trump as it was for liberal Germans to believe the military would protect the nation from Hitler’s excesses.

More consideration of the rhetorical situation of Trump's Many Sides statement.

> There is a reason we generally want our presidents to speak out against racism against African Americans amid outbreaks of racial strife and violence. They are well positioned to remind the nation of our founding creed, and of our most conspicuous betrayal of it — of the historically unique experience of African Americans as targets of centuries of violent subjugation, as well as sustained domestic terrorism and deeply ingrained racism, which continues today.

This account makes it clear that Trump mis-used the rhetorical moment. Didn't just miss the opportunity to condemn white supremacists but used it to normalize racism. This is not a rhetorically innocent move.

> The president said he condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” on Saturday. He then repeated the phrase “on many sides” for emphasis. A White House spokesperson later amplified the president’s remarks, telling the Guardian: “The president was condemning hatred, bigotry and violence from all sources and all sides. There was violence between protesters and counter-protesters today.”

> But there was strong reaction to Trump’s refusal to denounce far-right extremists who had marched through the streets carrying flaming torches, screaming racial epithets and setting upon their opponents.

Trump tries to take naming out of debate. The conservatives make it the center of debate - by declaring the name is not open for debate.

> But this abomination that happened in Charlottesville over the weekend is not up for debate. It’s not a cultural take or a political platform. Racism, bigotry and terrorism in the name of white nationalism isn’t a “side.” It’s a poison.

The mainstream is raising the specter of Nazism. I never thought I would tag a post with nazism.

> this is the natural result of defining authenticity as spontaneity. Trump and his people did not believe the moment worthy of rhetorical craft, worthy of serious thought. The president is confident that his lazy musings are equal to history. They are not. They are babble in the face of tragedy. They are an embarrassment and disservice to the country.

But

> Ultimately this was not merely the failure of rhetoric or context, but of moral judgment. The president could not bring himself initially to directly acknowledge the victims or distinguish between the instigators and the dead. He could not focus on the provocations of the side marching under a Nazi flag.

> If great words can heal and inspire, base words can corrupt. Trump has been delivering the poison of prejudice in small but increasing doses. In Charlottesville, the effect became fully evident. And the president had no intention of decisively repudiating his work.

> In truth, it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. In a pure market system, access to medical care will be unaffordable for a huge share of the public. Giving them access to quality care means mobilizing government power to redistribute resources, either through direct tax and transfers or through regulations that raise costs for the healthy and lower them for the sick. Obamacare uses both methods, and both are utterly repugnant and unacceptable to movement conservatives. That commitment to abstract anti-government dogma, without any concern for the practical impact, is the quality that makes the Republican Party unlike right-of-center governing parties in any other democracy. In no other country would a conservative party develop a plan for health care that every major industry stakeholder calls completely unworkable.

> The power to destroy remains within the Republican Party’s capacity. The power to translate its ideological principles into practical government is utterly beyond its reach.

> President Trump, monster and scapegoat, is too rash in his overall demeanour, too uncalibrated in his words and gestures, too ill-adapted to the routines of politics to carry credit even when he is speaking common sense.

> ridicule is not enough. It’s necessary to address the concerns and beliefs of those who are taken in by the fraud, or who don’t recognize the nature and significance of the issues for other reasons. If by philosophy we mean reasoned and thoughtful analysis, then it can address the moment, though not by confronting the “alternative facts” but by analyzing and clarifying what is at stake, whatever the issue is. Beyond that, what is needed is action: urgent and dedicated, in the many ways that are open to us.

> Trumpism is a form of collective gaslighting at Twitter speed. It is founded on the principle that velocity trumps veracity.

> All of this is serious. But it’s not as serious as the seeping, constant attempt — one sacred value at a time — to disorient Americans to the point they accept the unacceptable, cede to the grotesque, acquiesce to total arbitrariness as a governing principle. On one side the Constitution; on the other the rabbit hole that leads to the Trump International Hotel.

> Sponsorship, a British director once told me, is implicit censorship. ... . A spokesperson for one of the sponsors said the portrayal of Caesar was clearly designed “to provoke and offend”, which some of us thought was one of theatre’s basic functions.

Why else would business put money behind art? Or a brand on a hockey rink? Or their name on an endowed chair?

Thick head, thin skin is no reason. But the point is that censorship is here. Political correctness now comes from the right.

> That large corporations are punishing creative expression because it is critical of Trump is worrying. Even more worrying, however, is the insidious but understandable creep of self-censorship among everyday Americans. This week provides yet another example that, when it comes to Trump, exercising your right to free speech – that dearest of American values – can prove an expensive endeavour.

> But “personalization” is not simply how we cope with our desire for individuality in an age of mass production, of course. It’s increasingly how we’re sold things. It’s how we are profiled, how we are segmented, how we are advertised to.

Trump's "cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage" makes the global community a global hallucination. Asserts the only position is his. Closes debate. Explains his spectacle. Illustrates how politics differs from business. Assigns us each our role.

Go Audrey. > Education needs to change, we have long been told. It is outmoded. Inefficient. And this “new normal” – in an economic sense much more than a pedagogical one – has meant schools have been tasked to “do more with less” and specifically to do more with new technologies which promise greater efficiency, carrying with them the values of business and markets rather than the values of democracy or democratic education.